New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

One of the best presentations I attended at the recent 2010 ACRM-ASNR Joint Education Conference in Montreal was provided by Dr Jeffrey Kreutzer and his team from Virginia Commonwealth University.  Dr Kreutzer and colleagues have been working for many years now on support and intervention strategies for families of people with acquired brain injury.  They have published extensively on this topic from their own clinical experience as well as on the basis of growing empirical evidence. Their work addresses issues such as supporting intimate relationships and helping families function when one member has acquired a brain injury.  The team at Virginia Commonwealth University are also champions for people often forgotten by the health care system, such as the non-disabled siblings of children with brain injury. 

One outcome from all of this work has been the creation of what the Virgina Commonwealth University team have called 'The BIFI' (Brain Injury Family Intervention), and recently they have developed a website to supplement the training they provide health professionals who wish to use this approach.  Unfortunately this training is currently only available in the United States. Nevertheless the BIFI website provides information on the content of the BIFI approach and videoed examples of how the BIFI is applied in practice. I suspect that even in isolation these videos will be of interest to NZ-based clinicians as well as people with TBI and their families.

In addition, there are video links on this website to tutorials and lectures on a range of issues related to therapy for families with brain injury, including topics such as:

• What happens to families after brain injury
• When couples should seek help
• Dealing with adolescents and TBI
• How TBI can affect marriage
• Coping with couples in crisis, and more.

Traumatic brain injury should be considered a 'family disorder' because of its wide reaching implications for not just the person with the injury but also for all those close to them. Yet, as I have argue elsewhere, while there is frequently lip-service paid to family-centred approaches to rehabilitation after brain injury, often interventions stop short of addressing problems that do not directly address the immediate needs of the individual with the impairments. Greater investment of health care resources should be made available to help the families of people with brain injury learn to adapt to their changing circumstances.  In the future, it would be excellent if training such as that provided by Dr Kreutzer's team were made available in NZ.